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"For us, everything was a performance." A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. "Everything poetic."
In this passage, from the Prologue of Act 3, Oliver continues to guide Colborne through his version of the events a decade earlier. In this conversation, he comes close to suggesting that Shakespeare was responsible for what happened, indicating that their immersion in the dramatist’s works shaped everything about their lives, from how they talked to their expectations for how one should behave. Here he is clear that they viewed all aspects of their lives, not just the time they spent on stage, as a performance. While many people might assume that one must play a part to function in society, these seven students not only believed that their lives should be conducted as if they were in a drama, they also believed that they had to be poetic, perfectly crafted, nuanced, and rich in meaning.
“In that one brief moment, I actually wondered if ‘okay’ or something like it might still be possible. But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.”
James confesses to Oliver that he hit Richard with the boat hook in Act 5, Scene 5. In this passage, from the end of that section of the novel, Oliver acknowledges his futile hope that, no matter what had occurred, a happy ending, one appropriate to comedy not tragedy, might still await them all. Conflating the students’ tragedy with King Lear, Oliver suggests that hope is what causes viewers to feel alongside the characters. Watching the play, the audience hopes for an outcome that the circumstances render increasingly impossible. Here, Rio uses the structure of tragedy to prepare readers of the novel, particularly those who might join Oliver in hoping for a possible happy ending, for the inevitable heartbreaking devastation that tragedy brings.
“I knew by then the way the story went. Our little drama was rapidly hurtling toward its climactic crisis. What next, when we reached the precipice?
First the reckoning. Then, the fall.”
At the end of Act 4, Scene 10, Oliver explicitly connects the lives of the group to the fixed structure of a story, moving from crisis to reckoning and then fall. Rather than assume that their lives were complicated and messy or that multiple outcomes were possible, he interprets their disparate experiences through the paradigm of Shakespearean tragedy. In so doing, though, he undermines his own agency in shaping the outcome. The structure of the story becomes, in other words, a kind of necessity. This is an idea that the title of the novel subtly suggests. Taken from King Lear, the full passage indicates that humans often shift the blame for their behavior to other things, using the idea of necessity to dimension the fact of choice. In this passage, Oliver follows a similar line of argument, replacing chance with the fixed structure of story and the forward momentum of drama.
"A good Shakespearean actor—a good actor of any stripe, really—doesn’t just say words, he feels them. We felt all the passions of the characters we played as if they were our own. But a character’s emotions don’t cancel out the actor’s—instead you feel both at once.…It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.”
In the Prologue to Act 4, Oliver tries to explain to Colborne what it means to be immersed in the works and words of William Shakespeare. Although the actor’s words are written by someone else, it is wrong to assume that they are not also his. A dramatic role is not exterior to the actor, easily removed like a costume. Instead, he draws in his performance on personal emotion and experience to bring both the character and Shakespeare’s words to life. But, because Shakespeare’s characters often live under tremendous duress, the actor, too, is subjected to these extremes, feeling everything twice. For an audience lost in a drama, it might be difficult to distinguish between art and life, and the same is true for the actor.
